I’m not seeking justice.
I’m seeking meaning.

With time, I understood that we never formed a healthy family because he never had the emotional capacity to be a whole adult.
He lived behind masks, driven by an impulsiveness no one knew how to name in the 1970s.
For years, I thought it was my fault.
I believed I had failed.

Today I know that what I survived with him, not everyone could have survived.

I turned that pain into calm, into healthy distance, and now into words.

He was not a bad man:
he was an ill one.
Emotionally broken, carrying wounds his own family chose to hide.
They left me alone facing a truth I barely dared to see.

At nineteen, we believe in words,
we miss the signs,
we don’t yet know that love can disguise an abyss.

He didn’t deceive me because I was naïve—
he deceived me because lying was the only way he knew how to survive.

With time, I learned that his chaos wasn’t chance:
it was trauma, addiction, impulsivity, unspoken disorders.

And then I could finally answer the question that followed me for half a lifetime:

Who did I marry?
A man emotionally ill, undiagnosed, unable to offer a stability he never possessed within himself.

I didn’t abandon him.
I learned to let him go.
And in that act,
I freed myself.

Chasa